Jeffrey Dahmer

• 1. Introduction

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  Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He became known as the Milwaukee Cannibal and the Milwaukee Monster.

  On the night of the 22nd of July 1991, police officers in a Milwaukee apartment pinned him to the floor. Dahmer turned his head toward them and muttered one sentence: "For what I did I should be dead."

  How does a man who kills for years, and keeps the evidence inside his own home, stay unnoticed for so long? His first killing came in Ohio in 1978, and he did not kill again until 1987. What happened in the years between? Why did a jury hear psychiatrists describe his mind and still rule him sane? And how did a man sentenced to life without parole die in prison only a few years later?

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• 2. Bones and Silence

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  Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the 21st of May 1960. He was the first of two sons. His father, Lionel Herbert Dahmer, studied chemistry at Marquette University and later worked as a research chemist. His mother, Joyce Annette Dahmer, was a teletype machine instructor.

  Accounts of his infancy conflict. Some sources say he was starved of attention, while others say both parents doted on him. Joyce was tense and argumentative. She was a hypochondriac who suffered from depression and spent more and more time in bed. On one occasion she attempted suicide using the drug Equanil.

  When Dahmer started first grade, Lionel's studies kept him away from home for long stretches. Dahmer later said he felt "unsure of the solidity of the family". He had been an "energetic and happy child" until double hernia surgery shortly before his fourth birthday. After that he became notably subdued. At elementary school he was quiet and timid, with few friends. One teacher saw early signs of abandonment, and they worsened when his mother became pregnant again.

  In October 1966 the family moved to Doylestown, Ohio. Joyce gave birth in December, and Dahmer was allowed to name his baby brother. He chose David. That same year Lionel finished his degree and began work as an analytical chemist in nearby Akron.

  At the age of four, Dahmer had watched his father pull animal bones from beneath the family home. Lionel later said the boy was "oddly thrilled" by the sound the bones made. Dahmer called them his "fiddlesticks" and began searching under and around the house for more. He even explored the bodies of live animals to learn where their bones lay.

  In May 1968 the family moved to Bath Township in Summit County, Ohio. It was their third address in two years. The house stood on one and a half acres of woodland, with a small hut a short walk away. In the hut, Dahmer kept large insects and the skeletons of small animals such as chipmunks and squirrels. Some were preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

  Two years later, over a chicken dinner, he asked his father what would happen if the bones were put in bleach. Lionel was pleased by what he took for scientific curiosity, and he showed his son how to bleach and preserve bones safely. Dahmer then began collecting dead animals, including roadkill. He dissected them and buried them beside the hut, sometimes setting the skulls on makeshift crosses. One friend remembered him saying he wanted to know how animals "fit together".

  In 1975 he decapitated the carcass of a dog, nailed the body to a tree, and put the skull on a stick in the woods behind his house. As a "prank", he invited a friend to look, claiming he had found the remains by chance. That same year, Joyce increased her daily use of Equanil, laxatives and sleeping pills. She pulled further away from her husband and sons.

  At Revere High School, Dahmer was seen as an outcast from his freshman year. By fourteen he was drinking beer and liquor in daylight, hiding bottles inside his school jacket. When a classmate asked why he was drinking whisky in a morning history class, he shrugged and called the alcohol "my medicine". Staff thought him polite and highly intelligent, though he earned only average grades. He played competitive tennis and briefly joined the school band.

  At puberty he realized he was gay and told neither parent. By his own later account, he began fantasizing in his early to mid-teens about dominating a completely submissive male partner. Those fantasies became tangled up with dissection. At about sixteen he hid in bushes with a baseball bat, waiting for a jogger he found attractive. The jogger never passed that day. Dahmer later called it his first attempt to attack and subdue another person.

  To his classmates he was a class clown. His stunts included bleating and faking seizures in school and in local stores, and they became known as "Doing a Dahmer". Sometimes he performed them for money to buy alcohol. In 1977, on a school trip to Washington, D.C., he bet his classmates he could get a personal tour of the White House. He phoned, persuaded officials to agree, and the class received an impromptu tour that included the office of Vice President Walter Mondale.

  His grades dropped in 1977, and his parents hired a tutor with limited success. They also attended counseling to save their marriage but kept quarreling. In September 1977, Lionel discovered that Joyce had had a brief affair, and they decided to divorce. The process turned bitter. Early in 1978, Lionel moved out and lived for a time in a motel on North Cleveland Massillon Road.

  In May 1978, Dahmer graduated from high school. A few weeks earlier, a teacher had caught him drinking cans of beer near the parking lot. Threatened with a report, Dahmer said he was having "a lot of problems" at home that the guidance counselor knew about. That spring Joyce, against a court order and without telling Lionel, took David to live with relatives in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Dahmer had just turned eighteen, and he stayed behind in the family home. The divorce was finalized on the 24th of July 1978, and Joyce was awarded custody of David and alimony payments.

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• 3. Years Adrift

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  On the 18th of June 1978, three weeks after his graduation, Dahmer picked up an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks. Hicks was heading to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park. He agreed to come to Dahmer's empty house for "a few beers". After hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Hicks wanted to leave and Dahmer did not want him to go. Dahmer struck him with a ten-pound dumbbell and strangled him.

  Over the following weeks Dahmer disposed of the remains. He buried them, later crushed the bones, and scattered them in the woods behind the house. He threw Hicks's necklace and the knife into the Cuyahoga River from the West Bath Road Bridge. He did not confess to the killing until 1991.

  Six weeks later, Dahmer's father and his fiancée returned to the house and found Dahmer living alone. That August, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University, hoping to major in business. His single term was unproductive, largely because of constant drinking. He failed Introduction to Anthropology, Classical Civilizations and Administrative Science. His only success was a B-minus in Riflery, and his overall grade point average was 0.45 out of 4.0. Lionel once paid a surprise visit and found the dormitory room strewn with empty liquor bottles. After three months Dahmer dropped out, though his father had already paid for the second term.

  At his father's urging, Dahmer enlisted in the United States Army in January 1979. He trained at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, and then as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. There he was reprimanded for drunkenness. One act of insubordination got his entire platoon punished, and fellow recruits gave him a severe beating.

  On the 13th of July 1979, he was sent to Baumholder, West Germany, as a combat medic with the 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division. In his first year he was an "average or slightly above average" soldier. Drinking wore down his performance, and in March 1981 he was judged unsuitable for service. He received an honorable discharge, because his superiors did not think his Army troubles would carry over into civilian life.

  On the 24th of March 1981, at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, he was handed a plane ticket to anywhere in the country. Dahmer felt he could not face his father. He was also "tired of the cold", so he chose Miami Beach, Florida. He worked at a delicatessen and spent most of his pay on alcohol. He was evicted from his motel room for not paying, and in September 1981 he phoned his father and asked to return to Ohio.

  Two weeks after he got home, Dahmer was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. He was fined $60 and given a suspended ten-day jail sentence. In December 1981, his father and stepmother sent him to live with his paternal grandmother, Catherine Dahmer, in West Allis, Wisconsin. She was the only relative toward whom he showed any warmth, and they hoped she might steady him. At first it worked. He went to church with her, did chores, and looked for work.

  In early 1982 he found a job as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center. He held it for ten months before being laid off. On the 8th of August 1982, he was seen exposing himself at Wisconsin State Fair Park, near about 25 people that included women and children. He was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs. He then stayed unemployed for more than two years, living on whatever money his grandmother gave him.

  In January 1985 Dahmer was hired as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory. He worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., six nights a week. Soon after he started, a stranger threw him a note in the West Allis Public Library offering a sexual act. Dahmer did not respond, but the note revived the fantasies of control from his teens. He began visiting Milwaukee's gay bars, bathhouses and bookstores. He also stole a male mannequin from a store, until his grandmother found it in a closet and made him throw it away.

  By late 1985 he was a regular at the bathhouses. He grew frustrated when partners moved, and after his arrest he said: "I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of as people". From June 1986 he gave partners liquor laced with sedatives. He got the pills by telling doctors he worked nights. After about twelve such cases, the bathhouses revoked his membership, and he turned to hotel rooms. Around then he read about the funeral of an 18-year-old man and thought of stealing the buried body. The soil was too hard, and he gave up.

  On the 8th of September 1986, Dahmer was arrested for masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys near the Kinnickinnic River. He first claimed he had merely been urinating, then admitted the offense. The charge was reduced to disorderly conduct. On the 10th of March 1987 he was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to undergo counseling. He was still living in his grandmother's house in West Allis when that probation began.

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• 4. Grandmother's House

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  Steven Tuomi, a 25-year-old from Ontonagon, Michigan, met Dahmer in a bar on the 20th of November 1987. Dahmer persuaded him to come to the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, where he had rented a room for the evening. Dahmer later said he meant only to drug Tuomi and lie beside him. The next morning he woke to find Tuomi dead beneath him, his chest bruised. Dahmer's own fists and one forearm were badly bruised too. He said he had no memory of the killing and "could not believe this had happened".

  He bought a large suitcase and carried the body to his grandmother's home. A week later he dismembered it and put the remains in the trash. He kept the head for two weeks, then tried to turn it into a skull with detergent and bleach. The process left it too brittle, and he destroyed it.

  Dahmer later described the Tuomi killing as pivotal. Afterward he stopped trying to control his compulsions and began hunting for victims, mostly in or near gay bars. He brought them to his grandmother's house, drugged them with triazolam or temazepam, and strangled them. Two months after Tuomi, he met James Doxtator, a 14-year-old Native American boy, and offered $50 to pose for nude pictures. He killed Doxtator in the cellar. A week later he dismembered the body, again putting the remains in the trash.

  On the 24th of March 1988, outside a gay bar called the Phoenix, Dahmer met 22-year-old Richard Guerrero. He offered $50 to spend the night, drugged him, and strangled him with a leather strap. Nine days later, on the 2nd of April, Dahmer met Ronald Douglas Flowers Jr., 25, at a pay phone outside another gay bar. He lured Flowers home by claiming to have cables to recharge a stranded car battery.

  After Flowers drank a drugged coffee, both men heard the grandmother call out, "Is that you, Jeff?" Dahmer answered in a way that made her think he was alone, though she saw he was not. Flowers lost consciousness, and Dahmer decided not to kill him. Hours later he walked the dazed man to a bus stop and left him there. Flowers woke in County General Hospital with bruise marks on his neck.

  In September 1988 his grandmother asked him to move out. She cited his drinking, the young men he brought home late at night, and the foul smells from the basement and garage. Dahmer found a one-bedroom apartment at 808 North 24th Street and moved in on the 25th of September. Two days later he was arrested for drugging and fondling a 13-year-old boy he had lured home with the promise of nude photographs.

  His father hired an attorney, Gerald Boyle. Psychological evaluations found that Dahmer felt deeply alienated. A second evaluation, two months later, described an impulsive man, suspicious of others and dismayed by his lack of accomplishments. His probation officer also cited a 1987 diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder. On the 30th of January 1989, Dahmer pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault and to enticing a child for immoral purposes. Sentencing was put off until May.

  During a ten-day Easter absence from work, beginning on the 20th of March, he moved back into his grandmother's home. On the 25th of March 1989, at a gay bar, he met Anthony Sears, a 24-year-old aspiring model. Dahmer said he had not planned a crime that night, but Sears "just started talking to me". He took Sears to his grandmother's house and killed him. Dahmer found Sears "exceptionally attractive". Sears was the first victim from whom he permanently kept body parts, which he stored in acetone in a wooden box in his work locker.

  On the 23rd of May 1989, Dahmer was sentenced to five years of probation and one year in the House of Correction, with work release so he could keep his job. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender. He was released two months before his scheduled date and moved back into his grandmother's home.

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• 5. Apartment 213

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  On the 14th of May 1990, Dahmer moved into Apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street. The apartment was furnished, close to his workplace, and cost $300 a month with all bills but electricity included. It sat in a high-crime area, and he carried Sears's preserved remains there with him.

  Within a week he killed his sixth victim, Raymond Smith, a 32-year-old prostitute. Dahmer lured him with the promise of $50 for sex and gave him a drink laced with seven sleeping pills. The next day he bought a Polaroid camera and photographed the body before dismembering it. He later spray-painted the skull and stored it beside Sears's skull in a filing cabinet.

  About a week after that, another young man came to the apartment. Dahmer accidentally drank the drugged drink meant for his guest. He woke to find clothing, $300 and a watch stolen. He never told the police, though on the 29th of May he told his probation officer he had been robbed.

  In June 1990, Dahmer killed a 27-year-old acquaintance, Edward Smith. He froze the skeleton for several months, hoping it would dry out, but it did not. Later he put the skull in the oven to dry, and it exploded. Dahmer told police he felt "rotten" about this murder because he could keep nothing of his victim.

  Less than three months later, outside a bookstore on North 27th Street, he met Ernest Miller, a 22-year-old from Chicago. Miller agreed to come for $50 and to let Dahmer listen to his heart and stomach. When Dahmer reached for a sexual act, Miller told him, "That'll cost you extra". Dahmer gave him a drink laced with sleeping pills. He had only two pills to give, so he killed Miller by cutting his carotid artery. He photographed the body and put the heart, liver, biceps and some flesh in the freezer to eat later.

  Three weeks after Miller's death, on the 24th of September, Dahmer met David Thomas at the Grand Avenue Mall. Thomas was 22 and a father of two. Dahmer invited him home for drinks and offered extra money for photographs. After drugging him, Dahmer felt no attraction but feared Thomas would wake angry. He strangled him and kept no body parts. His photographs of the dismemberment later helped police identify Thomas.

  Dahmer then went almost five months without killing. On at least five occasions between October 1990 and February 1991 he tried and failed to lure men to his apartment. Throughout 1990 he complained to his probation officer of anxiety and depression. He spoke of his sexuality, his solitary life and his money troubles. Shortly before Thanksgiving, he said he dreaded meeting his father and younger brother. He also mentioned suicidal thoughts more than once.

  In February 1991, Dahmer spotted Curtis Straughter, 17, at a bus stop near Marquette University. He offered money for nude photographs, with the added promise of sex. He drugged Straughter, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and strangled him with a leather strap. He kept the skull, hands and genitals and photographed each stage of what followed.

  On the 7th of April, Dahmer met Errol Lindsey, 19, who was walking to get a key cut. At the apartment Dahmer drugged him and drilled a hole in his skull, injecting hydrochloric acid. He hoped to create a permanent, unresisting, submissive state. Lindsey woke and said: "I have a headache. What time is it?" Dahmer drugged and strangled him again. He tried to preserve the skin in salt water for weeks, but it grew frayed and brittle.

  By then the residents of the Oxford Apartments had complained repeatedly to the manager, Sopa Princewill. They reported foul smells from Apartment 213, the sound of falling objects, and occasionally a chainsaw. Dahmer first blamed a broken freezer that had spoiled its contents. Later he said several of his tropical fish had died.

  On the 24th of May 1991, he met Tony Hughes, a 31-year-old aspiring model, at a nightclub. He lured him home with an offer of money to pose for photographs. Dahmer repeated the drilling and acid injection, and this time it proved fatal. Hughes's body stayed in the apartment for days.

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• 6. A Domestic Dispute

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  On the afternoon of the 26th of May 1991, Dahmer met a 14-year-old Lao teenager named Konerak Sinthasomphone on Wisconsin Avenue. Dahmer did not know that the boy was the younger brother of the boy he had molested in 1988. He offered money to pose for Polaroid pictures. The boy hesitated, then agreed, and he posed in his underwear for two photographs before Dahmer drugged him.

  The body of Tony Hughes lay naked on the bedroom floor. Dahmer believed the boy saw it but did not react, probably because of the pills he had taken. Dahmer drilled a single narrow hole in the boy's skull and injected hydrochloric acid. He drank several beers beside him, slept briefly, and then left to drink at a bar and buy more alcohol.

  In the early hours of the 27th, Dahmer came back toward his building and found Sinthasomphone sitting naked at the corner of 25th and State. The boy was talking in Lao, and three distressed young women stood near him. Dahmer told them the boy was his friend, called him by the alias John Hmong, and tried to lead him away by the arm. The women had already phoned 9-1-1 and talked him out of it.

  Two Milwaukee police officers, John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, arrived, and Dahmer's manner relaxed. He said Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend. He said the boy had drunk too much after a quarrel and often behaved this way, adding that he had been drinking Jack Daniel's. The officers saw no injury beyond a scrape on the boy's knee and believed he was drunk.

  One of the women tried to tell an officer that the boy was bleeding and had struggled against Dahmer's attempts to walk him home. The officer told her to "butt out" and "shut the hell up". Three members of the Milwaukee Fire Department also examined the boy and gave the police a yellow blanket to cover him. One of them believed he needed treatment, but the officers told the fire personnel to leave.

  A third officer, Richard Porubcan, arrived. He, Gabrish and Balcerzak escorted Dahmer and the boy to the apartment while Dahmer praised the police and complained about crime in the neighborhood. Inside, he showed the officers the two semi-nude Polaroids to support his story. Gabrish noticed a strange smell like excrement, which came from the decomposing body of Hughes. Balcerzak smelled nothing unusual. According to Dahmer, one officer only "peeked his head around the bedroom" without taking a good look.

  The officers left, telling Dahmer to "take good care" of the boy. They logged the call as a "domestic dispute". Once they were gone, Dahmer injected acid into the boy's brain a second time, and the second injection was fatal. On the 28th of May he took a day's leave from work to dismember the bodies of Sinthasomphone and Hughes, keeping both skulls.

  The pace then quickened. On the 30th of June he met Matt Turner, 20, at a Chicago bus station and invited him to Milwaukee for a professional photo shoot. Dahmer drugged and strangled him. Turner was never reported missing. On the 5th of July he lured Jeremiah Weinberger, 23, from a Chicago bar with the promise of a weekend together. Dahmer injected boiling water into his skull, and Weinberger died two days later after falling into a coma.

  On the 15th of July, at 27th and Kilbourn, Dahmer met Oliver Lacy, 24, who agreed to pose nude for photographs. This time Dahmer wanted more time with a living victim, and he failed to sedate Lacy with chloroform. He phoned his workplace to ask for a day off. The request was granted, but the next day he was suspended.

  On the 19th of July, Dahmer received word that he had been dismissed. That same day he lured Joseph Bradehoft, 25, to the apartment.

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• 7. Tracy Edwards

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  Tracy Edwards, a 32-year-old man, was the only one of three men approached at the Grand Avenue Mall on the afternoon of the 22nd of July 1991 who agreed to go with Dahmer. Dahmer offered each of them $100 to pose for nude photographs, drink beer and keep him company.

  Inside Apartment 213, Edwards noticed a foul odor and several boxes of hydrochloric acid on the floor. Dahmer said he used the acid to clean bricks. When Edwards turned to look at the tropical fish, Dahmer snapped a handcuff onto his wrist. Edwards asked, "What's happening?" Dahmer failed to cuff his other wrist and led him to the bedroom.

  There Edwards saw nude male posters on the wall, a videotape of The Exorcist III playing, and a blue 57-gallon drum in the corner giving off a strong smell. Dahmer pulled out a knife. He rocked back and forth, chanting, then laid his head on Edwards's chest to listen to his heartbeat. He said he intended to eat Edwards's heart.

  Edwards kept saying he was Dahmer's friend and would not run. He asked to sit in the air-conditioned living room with a beer, and Dahmer agreed. When Dahmer's attention lapsed, Edwards asked to use the bathroom again. Dahmer was no longer holding the handcuffs, so Edwards punched him in the face and ran out the front door.

  At 11:30 p.m., Edwards flagged down two Milwaukee police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller. He told them a "freak" had put handcuffs on him. The officers' keys did not fit, so Edwards led them back to the apartment he had fled. Dahmer let them in and admitted putting the cuffs on, though he gave no reason. He said the key was in his bedside dresser.

  Mueller went into the bedroom and saw a large knife under the bed. An open drawer held scores of Polaroids, many showing human bodies in stages of dismemberment. The furnishings showed they had been taken in that very apartment. Mueller carried some into the living room and told his partner, "These are for real." When Dahmer saw the photographs, he fought the officers. They quickly overpowered him.

  Mueller then opened the refrigerator and found a freshly severed head on the bottom shelf. A fuller search by the Criminal Investigation Bureau turned up four severed heads in the kitchen and seven skulls in the bedroom and a closet. Investigators found two human hearts and a portion of arm muscle in the refrigerator. In the freezer they found a torso and a bag of organs. Elsewhere were two complete skeletons, a pair of severed hands, a mummified scalp, and three more torsos in the acid-filled drum. Police counted 74 Polaroid pictures of the dismemberment of victims. The chief medical examiner said: "It was more like dismantling someone's museum than an actual crime scene."

  Beginning in the early hours of the 23rd of July, Detective Patrick Kennedy questioned Dahmer. Over the next two weeks, Kennedy and later Detective Dennis Murphy interviewed him for more than 60 hours. They compiled a 178-page confession. Dahmer waived his right to a lawyer, saying he had "created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it".

  He confessed to every killing he remembered. For Steven Tuomi he had no memory of the act, so he could not say whether Tuomi was unconscious when he died. Dahmer admitted to eating the hearts, liver, biceps and parts of the thigh of three victims from the Oxford Apartments: Raymond Smith, Ernest Miller and Oliver Lacy. He said he did it first from "curiosity", and added: "I suppose, in an odd way, it made me feel they were even more a permanent part of me." Of the final two months, he said he had been "completely swept along" by an "incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost".

  He also explained the skulls. He had been building a private altar. Seven skulls would sit on the black table in his living room, flanked by the complete skeletons of Miller and Lacy. The four heads from the kitchen were meant to join them. Incense sticks would stand at each end of the table, with a large blue lamp above. The whole arrangement would face a window covered by a black shower curtain, with a black leather chair in front. Asked on the 18th of November 1991 whom the altar honored, he answered: "Myself... It was a place where I could feel at home." He called it a "place for meditation" and added: "If this had happened six months later, that's what they would have found."

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• 8. Verdict and Prison

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  On the 25th of July 1991, Dahmer was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. By the 22nd of August, eleven more Wisconsin murders had been added. On the 14th of September, investigators in Ohio identified two molars and a vertebra from woodland behind his old home. They had found hundreds of bone fragments there and matched these to X-ray records of Steven Hicks. Three days later, Ohio authorities charged him with Hicks's murder.

  The district attorney did not charge Tuomi's murder, because charges were brought only where guilt could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Dahmer remembered nothing of it, and no physical evidence existed. He also faced no charge for his attack on Edwards.

  On the 13th of January 1992, Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to 15 counts of murder. Under Wisconsin law, the plea waived any trial on his guilt. His trial opened on the 30th of January before Judge Laurence Gram in Milwaukee and turned on whether he suffered from a mental disease. The defense argued that obsessions and impulses he could not control drove him. Fred Berlin testified that Dahmer's necrophilic paraphilia left him unable to conform his conduct. Judith Becker, a professor of psychiatry and psychology, diagnosed necrophilia too. She said Dahmer told her he preferred comatose partners to dead ones "75 percent" of the time. Forensic psychiatrist Carl Wahlstrom added diagnoses of borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, alcohol dependence and a psychotic disorder.

  The prosecution called Fred Fosdal on the 8th of February. He testified that Dahmer had no mental disease or defect and was calculating and cunning, with a lust that overpowered his morals. Park Dietz began testifying on the 12th of February. He said "Dahmer went to great lengths to be alone with his victim and to have no witnesses." Dietz argued that the advance preparation showed the crimes were not impulsive. He also pointed to the drinking before each murder: "If he had an impulse to kill or a compulsion to kill," Dietz testified, "he wouldn't have to drink alcohol to overcome it. He only has to drink alcohol to overcome it because he is inhibited against killing." Dietz added that Dahmer identified with the villains of The Exorcist III and Return of the Jedi, and sometimes watched scenes from them before hunting for a victim.

  Two witnesses appeared independently of either side. Psychiatrist George Palermo said Dahmer killed from "pent-up aggression within himself" and wanted to destroy the source of his own attraction to men. Psychologist Samuel Friedman said a longing for companionship drove Dahmer, whom he called "amiable, pleasant to be with, courteous, with a sense of humor".

  On the 14th of February, each side had two hours for closing arguments. Boyle said the killings flowed from "a sickness he discovered, not chose". Prosecutor Michael McCann answered that Dahmer was a sane man in full control who simply tried to avoid detection. McCann said the insanity plea was an attempt to escape responsibility.

  On the 15th of February, the court ruled Dahmer sane at the time of each of the 15 murders. On every count, two of the twelve jurors dissented. At sentencing on the 17th, Dahmer read a statement. He said he had never wanted freedom and that none of the murders was motivated by hatred. He added: "I know my time in prison will be terrible, but I deserve whatever I get because of what I have done."

  The judge gave him life plus ten years on the first two counts and life plus seventy years on each of the remaining thirteen. Death was not an option, because Wisconsin had abolished capital punishment in 1853. His father and stepmother, Shari, were allowed a private ten-minute meeting with him before he was transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage. About three months later he was taken to Lorain Correctional Institution in Grafton, Ohio. After a 45-minute hearing on the 1st of May 1992, he received a sixteenth life term for killing Hicks.

  Back at Columbia, Dahmer spent his first year in solitary confinement because of fears for his safety. People around the world wrote to him, and some sent money, which he spent on cassette recordings, stationery, cigarettes and magazines. At his own request, he moved after a year to a less secure unit. He was assigned a daily two-hour work detail cleaning the toilet block, and later the prison gymnasium.

  Soon after finishing his confessions, he had asked Detective Murphy for a Bible. He gradually became a born-again Christian. At his father's urging he also read creationist books from the Institute for Creation Research. In May 1994, Roy Ratcliff, a minister in the Church of Christ, baptized him in the prison whirlpool. The two had met on the 20th of April. Ratcliff visited weekly, and they often discussed death. Ratcliff later said Dahmer questioned whether he was sinning against God by continuing to live. In a 1994 interview on Dateline NBC with Stone Phillips, Dahmer said: "If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway."

  On the 3rd of July 1994, inmate Osvaldo Durruthy tried to slash Dahmer's throat with a razor embedded in a toothbrush in the prison chapel. Dahmer suffered only superficial wounds. His family said he had long been ready to die. His mother, Joyce, spoke to him by phone every week, though they had not seen each other since Christmas 1983. When she voiced concern for his safety, he answered: "It doesn't matter, Mom. I don't care if something happens to me."

  On the morning of the 28th of November 1994, Dahmer left his cell for his work detail with two other inmates, Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. The three were left unsupervised in the gym showers for about 20 minutes. At about 8:10 a.m., Dahmer was found on the bathroom floor with extreme head wounds. He had been struck with a 20-inch metal bar and his head had been struck repeatedly against the wall. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital an hour later. Anderson, beaten with the same bar, died two days later. Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for a murder committed in 1990, told authorities he attacked Dahmer first as Dahmer cleaned a staff locker room. Then he attacked Anderson in an inmate locker room.

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